In the first of a series of photo essays from Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing & Organizing (WIEGO) Carlin Carr introduces members of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad. The organisation has been supporting informal workers to gain greater visibility and improve their working conditions.

Contributory social transfers make up for a negligible share. The same pattern follows for the temporary/informal sector and in the case of self-employed people in India, except that contributory social transfers shrink even further, adding almost nothing to a person's share of income whether self-employed or informally employed.

According to the National Commission on Self Employed Women, more than 12 crore women work in the unorganised sector. On Tuesday, a public hearing on maternity entitlement and child care was held in Delhi. It was attended by activists of the Right to Food Campaign and more than 200 members of women's groups and trade unions.

India’s premier B-school for strategic marketing and communication, MICA, has decided to join hands with Self Employed Women's Association (Sewa), a trade union for poor, self-employed women workers, for the capacity building of the ‘Master Trainers’ of Sewa.

Ela Bhatt is an Indian cooperative organizer and activist who founded the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). She was influenced by the fact that thousands of women factory workers worked elsewhere to supplement the family income, but there were state laws protecting only those who were solely industrial workers and not these self-employed women.

More than a century of manufacturing growth has been led by a move toward centralized mass production and increasing mechanization. This has delivered efficiency and consistency, but often at the cost of meaningful work, fair wages for laborers and large externalities such as poor environmental impacts. Traditional, localized and often labor-intensive manufacturing, collectively termed as creative or artisanal industries, have typically been relegated to exotic and niche status.